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The promise of perfection, of minimalism, of simplicity, is a promise that invites you to discourage with complexity because complexity is the place where you’ll have to decide something for yourself. “Keep it simple” is code for “don’t think about this too hard,” and not thinking too hard is a sedative as powerful as anything pharmaceutical.

Free Joan Didion by Haley Mlotek  for The Awl

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DOES THE SMOCKED HERRING COME WITH A CRINOLINE?

The restaurant business is hard, so you're not doing yourself any favours if you spend all that cash on the decor, and can't be bothered to proofread the menu before your grand opening.

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"We all love a sad song. Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to.We all begin as the hero of our own dramas in centre stage and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we're left on the sidelines wondering why we no longer have a part - or want a part - in the whole damn thing. Everybody's experienced this, and when it's presented to us sweetly, the feeling moves from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”

Leonard Cohen  on the success of Hallelujah

interviewed by Mark Ellen in The Times -September 19

via @dbelbin

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ROBIN WILLIAMS 1951-2014

His wit was a laser sparking off a sky full of fireworks.  In comparison, mine is the lump of coal buried in an abandoned mine, so I will leave it at this-I am sad that he is gone and that metal illness is such a cruel and stealthy devastator of happiness.

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This is the best thing I've read in weeks. Roxanegay, you are splendid.

It has rained all day. It is dark outside. I don’t mind. It seems appropriate.

I wrote an essay for The New York Times about the beach. It’s humor. I mention this because I have already received an e-mail, from a stranger, explaining to me why I am wrong about the beach. Thank you.

Here is...

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#MemeGOP #UniteBlue #Benghazi #ElizabethWarren

http://ow.ly/wVh90 

She nails it every time she speaks

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 He wants the viewer to see the painting and everything in it all at once, to get it, because there is nothing more to see after that first glance. 

-John Yau, "Julian Schnabel's Formula for Greatness"

There's nothing quite like a good scathing review to get the day going.

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I had a dream, a dream about you baby.

Brooklyn courtyards

photo by William Gale Gedney, 1955 via: Duke University

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AUTOMAT DAYS

I remember being taken to an automat in New York exactly like this. Perhaps it was this one; in the 70s there were still quite a few around, although they were modern and exotic to me. I was still so young I don't think I'd even seen a vending machine yet.  I don not remember the food. It was the place that impressed me.

All this to mention that Sean Michaels has a sweet piece  at 49th Shelf on a New York even earlier than this, where the automat is the end of the party, not the main attraction.

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““If you’re wrong about a war, or several, it should say that under your name on the news, instead of your new book. Because a lot of people don’t have the time, and they just see a very serious man in a very serious suit saying that we’re in danger.”

Listen to the show.

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[I]n the stubbornly diverse real world, there are plenty of women who love music and know quite a bit about it, who have to allow ample room in our moving...

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Back in 2003 I attended a talk by David Brin, at Worldcon here in Toronto. Brin had blurbed Starfish; to say I was favorably disposed towards the man would be an understatement. And yet I found myself increasingly skeptical as he spoke out in favor of ubiquitous surveillance:...

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Flow is a floating instrument that “lives and breathes and responds to the river” – amazing sensor-driven electroacoustic machinery that sets the water to music. Best thing since the Solar System set to music. 

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Philip Glass “Geometry of Circles” Sesame Street, 1979

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Skateboarding NYC in the 1960’s

photos by Bill Eppridge

I can remember falling off one of these frighteningly narrow boards after one of the kids in the neighbourhood found one in the 70s.

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LUMIOTHERAPY 2014

at Quartier des Spectacles, Montreal. 

This year's installation is called  Entre les Rangs-- rangs being the system of land division in New France.

More than 28 thousand clear light reflectors on slim plastic poles form the virtual field criss-crossed with paths. It doesn't look like much during the day, but as the sun goes down, Patrick Watson's music and strategically placed colour projectors turn the plastic field and its paths into a shimmering evocation of wheat fields in summer.